Overview

This intimate insight into Jarman's inner world was shot on fragile Super8 with the help of friends and collaborators, movingly utilising a cast of iconic, religious figures that include Jesus, Judas and the Madonna.

Shifting from the personal to the political it culminates in a near-mythic exploration of sexual repression at the end of the 20th century. Increasingly ill by this point, Jarman faces his mortality with poetry and dignity.

The Brothers Quay's powerful visualisation of a piece by Karlheinz Stockhausen. A woman alone in a room repeatedly writes a letter with tiny broken off pieces of pencil lead. Outside her window, vistas of ever-changing light register her every emotion.

Written for Channel 4 by radical literary theorist Terry Eagleton and directed by Derek Jarman, Wittgenstein is a bold, offbeat biography, exploring the politics and sexuality of the great, troubled philosopher.